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Dream Reality Interactive might be onto something here. Its answer to making sure everyone from your grandparents to your nephew is trying VR this Christmas? Replace real presents with virtual ones. In this case, it’s the marble maze, a rare symbol of present-ized unification under the tree. It’s something that everyone can pick up, play with and ultimately get addicted to. The same is true of Arca’s Path.

This is UK-based DRI’s first commercial VR release and I have to admit it’s not what I expected. Set in a distant future, you follow a young girl that discovers a VR-like headset of her own amongst a trash heap, transporting her to a much more peaceful world in which you steer a ball through a series of levels using just VR’s head-tracking alone. Given that this is a team partly comprised of former members of PlayStation VR Worlds’ Sony London, I’d assumed its first game would build upon, say, the ground-breaking immersion of Ocean Descent or the heart-pounding action of London Heist. But DRI is casting its net wider here.

“The initial pitch to the team was ‘What can we do that runs on any headset?’, which was actually a commercial decision,” studio director Dave Ranyard tells me when I visit the team’s offices last month. “There’s not that many headsets and there’s loads of weird controllers, so we asked ‘What can we do that takes all that problem away and just consolidates that market?’ which is this.”

‘This’ is a surprisingly tranquil little game; peaceful and unassuming and yet immediately engaging, striking the delicate balance between entertainment and challenge with aplomb. You don’t need to press any buttons, nor wave your hands about, but you will need to move your head with a meticulous degree of precision. Whilst the first two levels I played serve as a breezy introduction, there are moments in which moving your neck a single degree too far will bring your ball tumbling off of the side, while collectibles dotted around the steep slopes and narrows paths tempt you to take riskier ground.

Arca is an experience that wants to appeal to both the core gaming audience and beyond, acknowledging that the former group has enough wave shooters and addressing the people that have no such interest in that genre. It helps that its neon-lit visuals are a joy to behold within VR, too.

“One of the things that we’re very pleased with Arca is that it is a new mechanic,” Raynard says, adding that the team spent around three months experimenting with ideas. “We came up with some mechanics and we could have made games with them, but we just tried again. What we ended up with, I think, is so intuitive that at E3, basically anyone who had played a game, you put it on their heads and didn’t need to tell them anything.”

It’s hard to argue that Arca’s control scheme works in a way that few controller-based games could hope to match. Every movement is an instinct; a

I Expect You To Die from Schell Games surpassed a revenue milestone of $3 million.

The spy-themed escape room VR game released in late 2016 and since shipped on every hand-controlled consumer VR platform alongside major updates that kept the game fresh over the last two years. It is available now on Steam, Oculus, the PlayStation Store and Windows Store.

A little more than a year ago Schell announced the game had surpassed just $1 million in gross revenue, so it actually saw $2 million in revenue generated in just the last year.

VR games in the early days are typically built by extraordinarily small teams, so many experiences out there are built by just a couple people doing the majority of the work. Meanwhile, companies like Oculus and HTC don’t release sales numbers for headsets. So any prospective VR developers trying to make smart decisions about how to spend their time and effort really only have the reports of other developers to hold onto when making their plans. That means when Beat Saber’s creators say it sold 100,000 copies in less than a month and the developer behind H3VR says he sold 100,000 copies over the previous two years, this data can help folks reverse engineer their own path to success by understanding what makes these titles work. Job Simulator achieved the same $3 million milestone in early 2017 and we’ve seen smaller milestones announced by Cloudhead’s The Gallery and Raw Data.

Schell Games is headed up by Jesse Schell, a game designer, professor and author who worked on the pioneering VR attraction DisneyQuest back when he was an imagineer.

What could be safer than putting on a VR headset, grabbing a motion controller by the wrist strap and then twirling it above your head to take flight?

WyVRn developer Hamster Ball recently showcased this frankly terrifying new form of VR locomotion, which allows you to whirl a hammer and lift off just like everyone’s favorite Norse Avenger, Thor. You know, Thor? The guy that can fly by having his hammer pull him off (Ragnarok pun intended)? He has a tendency to break everything in sight and, well, this little experiment seems like it has the potential to do the game. And we thought Echo Arena was a safety hazard.

Watch it in action below. There’s also some, um, pelvis swinging for good measure. You’ve been warned.

via Gfycat

Heck, even the developer thinks this is a bad idea. “In fact, I don’t recommend unironic use of this locomotion at all,” he wrote on Reddit. “You’ll hurt someone or break something.”

Yeah, we’ll stick to just playing as Thor in Marvel: Powers United VR, thanks.

It sounds like you can expect Firewall Zero Hour‘s matchmaking problems to be fixed in the near future.

In a post on the PlayStation Blog developer, First Contact Entertainment reassured fans that they were “working hard” to bring improvements to the PlayStation VR (PSVR) exclusive shooter, which launched late last month. Specifically, the team is “continuing to evaluate” and improve upon the game’s squad handling, which is giving players that are looking to team up with friends as squads some issues.

First Contact is also looking to improve its host performance, which uses a peer-to-peer format. Currently, this means that, when the host quits a game, everyone else is at risk of losing their progress that match. The studio is looking at a way to protect from that and improved in-game messaging.

“Lastly, we wanted you to know we are reading all the feedback we can, and our goal is to continue to improve the game so that it’s a great experience for everyone,” First Contact wrote. “We wanted to note that we are focused on supporting the game post-launch with additional new content, and will have more to share about that soon!”

Firewall seems to have been performing pretty well sales-wise since its launch, topping PS Store Charts and ranking well in UK software listings, so there’s likely a lot of players out there looking for these improvements. We’ll bring you more as soon as we hear it.

It might be time to put Firewall on pause for a bit; another PlayStation VR (PSVR) multiplayer shooter is getting an open beta next week.

Strange Games’ Honor and Duty: D-Day, a World War II-era shooter, will have a free testing session in both the US and EU starting September 18th. The developer also explained that the beta will take place in phases, with the first including vehicles. Later phases will add more features.

Honor and Duty: D-Day can only be played without a VR headset, suggesting this could be a multiplayer game that VR fans won’t struggle to find games in. On PSVR, though, it can be played with the excellent Aim Controller, which should provide a more immersive experience. There’s plenty of VR footage on the game’s YouTube channel; it definitely doesn’t have the polish of Firewall, but hopefully the mechanics can make up for that.

As enterprise businesses start to see the benefits of immersive tech, VR Intelligence brings together immersive leads from Johnson & Johnson and DHL, along with HTC Vive, for a webinar to discuss where and how companies can get a real return on their investment in XR.

Last month, an XR industry survey by VR Intelligence revealed some interesting feedback on the uses of VR and AR in enterprise. On one hand, the vast majority of companies already using immersive tech, claimed they were seeing positive results and intend to invest more. On the other, many enterprise companies yet to implement the technology, reported difficulty in proving ROI to gain internal buy-in from budget holders.

While XR companies have excelled in creating hardware and software to transform industries – from architecture to automotive, retail and beyond – the question now comes in how those benefits can be measured and communicated, in order to push for further adoption and investment.

To understand this further, VR Intelligence is bringing together two major household brands – Johnson & Johnson and DHL, along with major VR headset gurus, HTC – to discuss what impacts the technologies are actually having, and how companies can build a business case for continued investment.

Benefits and applications of XR tech and how to gain buy-in from the right people
The importance of proving the value proposition of XR from the start to enable it to sustain and scale
Why consistently tracking and measuring success is key to proving the business case and demonstrating ROI

The webinar will take place on September 20 at 10am PDT. To register for the webinar, or receive the recording afterwards, go to https://bit.ly/2x4DPPS

This is a promotional post not produced by the UploadVR staff. No compensation was exchanged for the creation of this content.

Orlando-based film studio Dolphin Image closes a $2M seed funding to further develop ARwall’s motion picture effects tools. Despite its heavy role in a vast majority of major motion picture productions, green screen technology is far from an ideal . A hefty price tag, considerable post production, and the need for a sizable amount of